Page 45 Review by Jonathan
For a certain American generation there is a word which perhaps inevitably carries more emotional baggage than any other, that word being Vietnam. This work, VIETNAMERICA is most certainly not a war story however, but a fascinating look at one (very) extended Vietnamese family's history spread across several generations now living both in Vietnam and America. It's documented and drawn by Tran Huu Gia-Bao (or GB Tran as he's more commonly known) who himself was born in South Carolina in 1976 a year after his parents fled Vietnam leaving several family members behind them.
VIETNAMERICA immediately draws comparisons with FORGET SORROW: AN ANCESTRAL TALE, as the focus is firmly on family with a dash of politics and history thrown in for good measure. Such is the complicated nature of GB's family, and the segmented way he's chosen to tell his story, moving backwards and forward through time from the present to the past and back again, I did initially find myself getting slightly confused as to who was who, and thinking I could really do with a family tree, when lo and behold, up one popped on page 62.
Once you have the various characters' relationships with each other a bit more firmly fixed in your mind, the work immediately becomes much more engaging, and you start to more fully understand some of the very difficult choices, and their attendant consequences, that were forced upon different generations of family members at times by the continuous political and social upheaval in Vietnam during various struggles against French colonialism, occupation during WW2 by Japan, the American war against the Communists, and finally the difficult period of internal unrest and uncertainty following that last conflict. GB manages to capture the flavour of 'normal' life for typical Vietnamese against such a continuous melodrama, without detracting from the central drama of the family history.
He also, wisely in my opinion, decides just to tell the family's story, rather than bringing himself and his own views on events into the work. When he does pop up from time to time it's usually providing a bit of light comic relief at his own expense, about his naivety concerning life and culture in modern Vietnam compared to the USA. Or providing a counterpoint for his mother to further elucidate some long-forgotten or hidden story, usually about his somewhat taciturn father. GB's actually an extremely good story teller, having obviously learnt that most vital of lessons regarding the depiction of true life events, just let the story tell itself.
The art is wonderful too, containing a seemingly never-ending host of clever visual devices such as panels spiralling out of his father's cigarette smoke as he grudgingly recounts another story, and a truly vibrant palette of colours, occasionally switching into black and white, and even combining the two on occasion for further effect. It seems the family play a lot of Scrabble too, and one of my favourite bits of art is the double-page spread of a Scrabble board inlaid with various panels depicting GB's parents early days in their newly adopted country. My absolute favourite artwork though, is the actual cover of the book (hidden under the none-too-shabby itself dust jacket) which features a partially constructed jigsaw puzzle of a face, made up from pieces taken from the faces of several different family members. The message, running throughout this work, is abundantly clear: you can separate people by continents, oceans and thousands of miles, but can you ever really separate a family?
